kief.com

First off, Ozlem and I are OK. I don't know about most of our other friends in town, mobile phone service is very poor, as you would expect. My Mom and Lucas are both flying into Gatwick this morning, but will get to our home by a taxi we've booked, so as long as flights are landing OK at Gatwick, and nothing happens there, they should be fine.

I was changing trains in King's Cross station, one of the busiest underground & national rail stations, when everyone was told to leave the station due to "a reported emergency". This isn't very unusual, the tube often has problems that cause them to close stations, often multiple stations, and their reported reasons are usually unreliable. Of course the idea of a terrorist attack occurred to me, it's been an inevitability for years. I considered getting a bus the rest of the way to work, but there were way too many other people looking for ways to get where they were going, so I decided to walk the 15-20 minutes or so, despite the rain.

A little while after I got to work Ozlem called and said there were reports of explosions on the tube. This sparked those of us in the office to start phoning around and reloading web pages, mainly the bbc, but also sky and cnn and some others.

At first the official story was a power surge. This seemed a bit dodgy, while the tube's infrastructure is well known to be old and problematic, the pattern of affected stations made it sound odd. Liverpool Street station was the first one reported as having had an actual explosion, at least one story said King's Cross had a power surge but not an explosion. One of my co-workers' mother said there was a report of a bus explosion, which began filtering onto the news sites as a rumor. I have to say I thought it was probably bogus, on 9/11 there were reports of car bombs in DC, and plenty of other wild rumors.

But it now turns out at least one, and probably more bombs went off on buses, timed for after the stations were closed and people crammed themselves onto the buses as the only public transportation still working. Photos of bus wreckage have made it onto news sites now.

And Scotland Yard has now confirmed there were bombs at the tube stations, not a power surge. There is also a report of two tube trains colliding at King's Cross, and multiple trains stuck between stations, underground, without power or any way of finding out what's going on (maybe they're better off thinking it's just a typical tube fuckup). One report says at least 90 people dead at Aldgate station. (update: This looks like the report is actually 90 injured, 2 dead at Aldgate). The picture of the bus wreckage on the sky news site leaves little doubt there were deaths there.

I'm guessing the power surge was a cover story prepared by the underground to use in a multiple-station terrorist attack, to keep people from panicking.

Text messaging on mobile services has been disabled, to prevent them from being used to trigger bombs. Bus services have been suspended now. There are constant sirens of emergency vehicles going by. There have been quite a few more in the past few minutes, I hope nothing else has happened.

This seems to have been a very well planned attack. The G8 summit in Edinburgh has drawn thousands of Metropolitan Police away from London to help with security there, so this was a classic Sun Tzu move. Many stations, and the staggered bus attacks. How many people were involved in planning and carrying this out?

How many people have died? Have any of my friends been hurt or killed?

It seems stupid to worry about this now, but how will we get home tonight, and how will we get to work in the next few days?

update

The taxi company tells me my Mom and Lucas have been picked up from Gatwick and are on their way. Their flight landed about half an hour early, but they were delayed getting out of the terminal. The taxi company - very good folks in Putney called A1 - tried to call both Ozlem and my mobiles, but they couldn't get through.

Ozlem has also spoken with our friend Akif, both he and Irena are OK.

We just moved to a new flat over the weekend. What a nightmare. We hadn't wanted to move, but our landlord decided to sell the place, since the london real estate market has started what is likely to be a long dive. Of course, if we owned our own place we wouldn't be subject to the whims of a landlord, but buying a place now is a) very difficult for first time buyers, thanks to the property bubble, and b) probably not a good idea at this point in the bubble.

The new flat is not far from our old one, but it very close to transportation - we can see the tube platform from our kitchen window. We can hear the trains as well. Although they're not as loud as the place we lived last year, which was right next to the mainline tracks, combined with the busy street (with crosswalks that bleep every half minute or so) and air traffic landing at Heathrow, the background noise level is pretty high with the windows open. A compensation is the large rooftop terrace, from which we an see the London Eye, the Gherkin, BT Tower, and Wembley Stadium.

It's a recently building, one of these "luxury" flats which are the only new housing being built these days, i.e. a shoebox crammed with shiny chrome fittings. The kind of trendily designed place that shows very nice, but turns out to have various practical flaws once you actually try to live in it.

It's going to be a week or two before we get our ADSL line in - only 1 Mbps instead of the 2 Mbps we had at the old place (luxury my ass!), and the only wifi signal anywhere in this 7 story, yuppy-packed building is an encrypted one from a nearby estate agent that I can pick up, but not use, on the balcony. So my email access is limited, but the worst thing is not having Google at my fingertips.

Friends, family, I'll try to send our new contact details around once my data drip-feed is restored, in the meantime both of our mobile numbers are still the same.

Just stumbled across the weblog of an old friend, Chris Larson. Hi Chris!

This is the lesson I learned watching the new Star Wars movie last night. "You're either with me, or you're my enemy." "Only a Sith thinks in absolutes." George's Sith Lord Master must be Darth Cheney.

I agree with those who've said this last movie was better than the previous two. It finally gives us what we've been expecting all along from these three prequels - it shows how and why Anakin turns to the Dark Side and becomes Darth Vader, it shows where Luke and Leia come from and how they end up where they are at the start of the original Star Wars (part IV), and it shows the origin of the Empire. Mostly what made this one more enjoyable than the previous two was that throughout it you are reminded of events and situations from the original trilogy.

The previous two movies only laid the groundwork for this movie, and probably could have been compressed into 30 minutes of this one.

Of course the dialogue and romantic chemistry is poor, as usual.

As for Anakin's conversion, I get the feeling we're supposed to buy this a logical thing. He's basically got three reasons for going Dark, one being his arrogant, impatient petulance, the second being a personal fear that he hopes to defeat, the third being a desire to do what's best for the galaxy.

The third one is hard to swallow. The logic the bad guy gives to convince Anakin that going against the Jedi is a good thing doesn't really work. I'm trying not to spoil the plot, but basically Anakin is led to believe the Jedi are doing something bad, to convince him to help the bad guy do the exact same bad thing. Maybe his annoyance with the Jedi is what leads him to it, but once it was all over, most of his reasons for going with the bad guy are pretty obviously invalid. I guess the Dark Force actively corrupts someone's mind once they give in, and makes them stupid.

The site ToryScum has some great photos of billboards for the UK Conservative Party that have been, uh, "modified". These billboards are just begging to be hacked. They feature a large handwritten message that emphasizes some fear-mongering aspect of the Conservative platform, for example "It's not racist to limit immigration", with the tagline "Are you thinking what we're thinking?", and plenty of whitespace.

There are some amusing modifications on that site, but what I'd like to see is thought bubbles coming out of the "Are you thinking what we're thinking", with suggestions of what Conservatives might be trying to imply without coming right out and saying it. The Economist has a good article on this "dog whistle politics", and a long piece which (for subscribers only, unfortunately) explores the facts of the immigration issue.

Of course, as a "bloody foreigner" I can't vote - not that I'm complaining, in spite of the substantial chunk of my paycheck that Tony and Gordon swallow every month. The "Who you should vote for" survey suggests the Lib Dems or the Greens match my views most closely (although I really don't give a toss about fox hunting, and the survey doesn't ask any questions about the environment). For those outside the UK, the Liberal Democrats are the official centrist party, but the political pigeonholes are a bit out of whack these days. Thanks to Tony Blair, the most business-friendly party in national politics is the one called "Labour" (which is a classic example of dry British "humour").

I would be sorely tempted to vote Lib Dem if I could, but they haven't got much of a shot, although they do much better than all of the third parties in the US combined. So I would be afraid the Tories would get in, and I learned my lesson about refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils on principle in 2000. In any case, Blair is supposed to step down in favor of Brown sometime in the next term, so in theory a vote for Labour is a vote for Brown, maybe, eventually, if they ever really do pry Tony's fingers off the controls.

As with any American who spends much time abroad, I occasionally get stick about how ignorant Americans are. Seemingly every European has a story of some appalling example of ignorance about geography, politics, or history on the part of an American they've met ("You're from Denmark? Oh, that's the capital of Holland, isn't it!") Never mind that most Europeans have a similar ignorance about geography in the other hemisphere ("You're from Tennessee? That's next to Texas, isn't it!"), in general American awareness of what's going on outside of the country's borders is feeble.

But a while back I witnessed an example of British ignorance that I'm now able to wield in defense in these situations, at least when dealing with English critics. I was watching a game show the other day, and an (English) contestant was asked, "Who is the head of the Church of England?" Her answer: "The Pope".

Now, our non-British readers, can be excused for not getting the seriousness of this error, but for several centuries saying something like that in this country was the kind of thing that got people hung, beheaded, pulled apart by horses, or burnt at the stake, sometimes all at once. And it's not like the whole thing with the English and the Pope is an obscure bit of trivia, it is the fundamental theme of several centuries of Enlish history.

Imagine an American saying that the head of state of the USA was the Queen of England and you get an idea of what's wrong with this.

Anyway, this came to my mind with the recent Royal Wedding. There were a number of people who, in person on the street interviews, objected to the idea of a divorced heir apparent marrying a divorced woman because of tradition and, you know, someday he's going to be King and the head of the Church! (In case you were wondering about the answer to the above game show question.)

This always makes me laugh. I really want to ask these people whether they know why the Church of England was founded in the first place? The answer, for those of any nationality who are ignorant to this bit of English history, is that the King of England wanted to get a divorce so he could marry his mistress. The pope wouldn't let him, so he started his own church and made himself the head of it.

Charles is a traditional guy after all.

Apparently I'm "mild mannered" Abe.

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

My Mom has whipped up some cafepress items with the definition of kief, as per my etymology page. These are sure to become a hit with hipsters around the world. Mugs, t-shirts, bags, bbq aprons, and, sure to be a top seller, "Etymology of Kief" throw-pillows. Get your Kief Swag today!!

Check how to start a startup out, it's by Paul Graham, who also wrote about what makes a great hacker. I've also recently read The Art of the Start, a great book for anyone thinking about starting a business, especially a tech one.

Most bloggers have missed the most useful points of the recent eyetrack study. I've seen a number of blog items on the eyetrack study recently published by Poynter. But checking it out this morning, I've found much more interesting things in it than the "people look at the top left of the page first" angle that most people are talking up. Granted, that's the angle mentioned at the top of the story.

Reading the article and looking at kief.com, I realize my new design is an atrocity of unreadability. Some key points:

• Headline sizes affect whether people actually read what's on the page, or skim it. Big page headlines, and article headlines significantly larger than the blurbs, encourage people to scan the page rather than read the details.
• My biggest crime is the groovy lines I put around the headline of each article. Even underlining headlines discourages people from reading the text beneath. Looking at it, the way I have the header and footer blocks of each post indented, although I find the look pleasing, is jarring for reading through the stuff on the page. This is the nastiest effect of my new design, I think.
• The first few words of the blurb are critical; they determine if someone is going to read the whole blurb. Of course it's no news that the lede needs to have a hook, but on the web it looks like the hook needs a sharper barb than in print.
• Shorter paragraphs are better. We're talking one or two sentences each
• Summary paragraphs at the beginning of an article are a winnder
• Interesting words or phrases can draw a reader's attention to areas of the page that wouldn't normally get looked at:

We observed a high number of eye fixations on a headline about clothing maker FCUK, which was placed far down on a page with a long list of headlines and blurbs

People do scroll down a page looking for interesting bits, but need something special that hooks them. One point is that although many people would probably try visual tricks to highlight things they want people to look at, like changing the color, using a big font size, or underlining it, but the other findings of the study suggest that would actually be counter-productive. The key is to make the actual words used compelling enough that people will read them.

Some other things I want to think about:

• Right side navigation actually gets people to spend more time looking at it
• Ads work better on the left side than the left
• Ads in the middle of the text work best (this is for attention, I don't know if they affect click-throughs)
• Separating ads with lines or even whitespace decreases the chance people will look at them. Not sure how you would do this without confusing people about what's advertising and what's editorial, this sounds like a false "win".
• People look at text ads much more than banners

So I need to take a stab at making my design more readable. I probably won't get around to it soon, since my plate is overflowing both at work and home, and we've got a trip to Turkey next week.